Robert Gibbs Is Obama’s Favorite White Friend

It’s Wednesday, everyone, and that’s the day of the week that the New York Times releases its Sunday Magazine to the Internet and Richard Cohen’s hated BlackBerrys! Obama must be so happy. Especially this week, because he’s mentioned in it! This issue’s cover story profiles legendary Hawk and Dove drunk Robert Gibbs, Obama’s former campaign communications “czar” and press secretary-elect. The Times‘ excellent Mark Leibovitch wrote the piece, so it’s quite readable and you may want to go through the whole thing yourself. But since you all are lazy unemployed slobs, we’ve extracted some of the more delightful bits below. Teaser: Obama is a hologram?

HA HA HA HA HA this is the best possible fourth paragraph; all fourth paragraphs in every story from now on should mock Mark Halperin, and certain aspects of Politico:

Staff members were encouraged to ignore new Web sites like The Page, written by Time’s Mark Halperin, and Politico, both of which had gained instant cachet among the Washington smarty-pants set. “If Politico and Halperin say we’re winning, we’re losing,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters.

Mark Leibovitch even got to interview Obama for this thing — the president himself! Naturally, he wants to kill all of his staff, because of Hillary Clinton:

When I spoke to Obama by phone earlier this month, he said he was not surprised by this. “The transition involves an awful lot of people who don’t actually work for me,” he said. “You’ve got a slew of volunteers in every agency in the vetting process. You’ve got F.B.I. folks involved when it comes to appointments. So we anticipated that we weren’t going to be able to march in lock step on our communications as effectively.” Still, Obama was said to be furious over the serial public airings about Hillary Clinton’s eventual nomination to be Secretary of State. He sent an explicit message that anyone caught leaking would be fired — and he sent it through his newly named chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who a couple of weeks earlier conducted a very public hand-wringing about whether he would take that job.

According to Obama, Gibbs is a lard-ass, just really really fat:

Gibbs gained considerable weight during the campaign that he is trying to shed, and he has a habit — maybe unconscious — of running his hands up and down his paunch while he speaks. (“The chronicle of his weight is a story unto itself,” Obama told me.)

We might infer that Dana Perino’s wife used to get harassed on the telephone, by Iraqi microphones:

Gibbs scrolled back a few days on his BlackBerry to show me a helpful reminder that the current White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, sent him. “Remember to unlist your phone number,” it said. “Your wife will thank you.”

As the lefty blogs know ALL TOO WELL NOW, the real Barack Obama is just George Bush in Muslim clothing:

“We talked a lot about the Bush model, which is that there are a few people who really know everything,” Plouffe told me in early December. That helps ensure an airtight bubble of knowledge. “If there was leaking, we tried to find out who did it,” Plouffe said. “You didn’t have to worry about having a conference call and anything getting out. That’s the value of a small, continuitous group.”

As in most small, continuitous groups, Obama and Gibbs developed a homosexual love for each other. But Obama and Gibbs like dirty, crude jokes, so they will probably laugh when we write that they give each other handjobs all the time while David Plouffe watches, cackling, from a dark corner:

Less than two years later, Obama was running for president and Gibbs was still at his side. He served in a variety of roles at first — spokesman, overseer, strategist and, in Gibbs’s words, Obama’s “traveling buddy.” “It’s not quite that they finish each others’ sentences,” Dunn said. “But they do have that mind meld.”

Obama called Gibbs “a very good friend of mine” who, like himself, is a “well-informed sports fan” and appreciates “gallows humor.” When I asked him for an example of this gallows humor, Obama demurred. “I’m not sure all of it is clean,” he said.

True bros, bro:

Dunn tells the story of a tense practice session before the third debate in which Obama, sitting at a table, kept looking up intently at Gibbs across the room. They were sending urgent-looking BlackBerry messages back and forth, and Dunn became concerned that some crisis had arisen. When the session ended, the men ran over to each other. It was a Sunday afternoon, and they had been following the fortunes of Obama’s fantasy football team.

Between Obama and the Press [NYT Magazine]